The worst of an extremely bad bunch have won
I have refused to vote in the Italian elections, holding that none of the candidates on offer were worthy of even reluctant consent by a free man. Or by anybody free to choose. To have to choose between supporting Veltroni, Berlusconi or the lesser lists is a choice that demeans a human being, and I will not make it. Until the Italian political system finally presents a candidate that does not make you want to turn your eyes in revulsion, I will stay home.
But even admitting that the others were bad, the Bossi-Fini-Berlusconi coalition is genuinely the bottom. Its leadership is so crass that it is genuinely difficult to explain to the rest of civilized mankind just how unimaginable it is that some of them had ever been allowed anywhere near power by an electorate that was free to choose.
Fini, the ex-Fascist, is the least intolerable of the three - and also the one who matters least. There is nothing to worry about in him: in his rush to shed all suspicions of Fascism or nationalism, he has morphed into the most predictable, shallow, and featureless middle-of-the-road PC politician, managing even a dumb little sex scandal that cost him a quite attractive wife. The trouble is that in seeking the consensual centre, he has taken several positions - in particular over embryo experimentation - that offend Catholics, and one of the lessons of the last two years is that you cannot govern Italy without Catholic support. What is more, his own party (now merged in Berlusconi's alliance) is made of people who, while they could see the sense of dumping Fascism as such, had a lot more respect for nationalism and old-fashioned values than he has. So he has lost support on two different grounds: the politically disastrous choice of challenging the Church, and the disaffection of a highly conservative and nationalistic base. What saves him is that there is nobody of any stature in the party to challenge him: the strongest figures are currently under investigation for very serious scandals - the kind of appropriation of public money that the old Fascist base were proud of not practicing in the days of the First Republic. So Fini stands because possible rivals are even less credible.
Bossi, the head of the Northern League, is not easy to explain to anyone who has no direct knowledge of the multiple train wreck that passes for Italian politics. Ignorant as a street thug, incapable of manners of any kind, he is the living embodyment of the worst kind of pub-philosopher, taxi-driver-hair-dresser political maunderer, of the kind of person whose attempts at an opinion you hear out in embarrassed silence. He relies on a base like himself, with no principles or religion (in a party that has to appeal to Catholics, he is an avowed pagan), who dropped out of school at fourteen to earn money and never learned anything else in their lives. Worst of all, he is a man who continuously uses the threat of violence without having the nerve to use it. To give an example of his incendiary rhetoric - one that did not reach the foreign press, because by now they discount him - was that if a certain kind of confusing electoral paper, which he supposed would work against him, was not changed, "we will take up our rifles". Governments of both sides have been subjected to this kind of repeated threat of violence for years. They, too, have learned to discount him. During the first Prodi government, ten years or so ago, he actually pretended to start a march for independence of the North from Rome. If this had been taken seriously, there was more than enough to suppress his party, chuck him in jail for high treason and assault upon the Constitution (both life-without-parole charges) and risk a civil war. Prodi, however, was coolly cynical. He let them have their fun. At the end of it, not a single state functionary had been turned out, the army, police and carabinieri were where they had always been, the Leghisti had had a lot of fun, nothing had changed, and nobody had been arrested. However, this constant talk of violence does have an effect - at the lowest level, where nobody notices. IN the last fifteen years, assaults upon Romans and southerners, and more recently upon immigrants, have become so frequent and vicious that the government has had to change the number-plates of cars to a system that does not show local origin. You cannot pour hatred into a country, build your power exclusively upon the most ignorant and vicious hatred, encourage your supporters in their ignorance and hatred, and not worsen conditions in the long run. Bossi is the scum of the Earth. I hate him particularly because, being myself half northern and half Roman/southern, he wants to take my country from me. But even if had no dog in this fight, I could still not begin to treat him as a decent human being without losing all my self-respect.
And Berlusconi... ahh, Berlusconi. How shall I explain our once and future Prime Minister to anyone who does not know that such thing can be? Firstly, by telling you that Berlusconi is nothing like what you would fear from a man in his position. He is not Citizen Kane. A foreigner thinking of a business tycoon, the richest man in the country, in control of most of the local television network and large financial and industrial holdings, and at the same time at the head of the country's largest party, would fear a direct assault on the freedom of thought and self-expression, the party use of television and other resources, the exclusion of other viewpoints. And Berlusconi has indeed sporadically made use of his resources. But the truth is that he is not coherent enough to develop a policy even within his own family business (his companies are tightly controlled, in the usual Italian fashion, by members of his own family). Being chiefly, indeed purely, a salesman, he shows whatever will sell. This has, in general, cheapened Italian TV - which, God knows, never was any great shakes - but the dreaded use of the jackboot to control popular culture has not come about. Apart from pathetically obvious and therefore easily resisted interventions in the news programs, there is not even the beginning of a coherent cultural policy in his enormous TV empire: unless showing as much female flesh as legally possible in prime-time shows amounts to a policy. There certainly is nothing conservative or Catholic, although these ought to be the support areas for his party.
Berlusconi, I said, is a salesman. To be precise (I have been a salesman myself), he is a snake-oil salesman. You can see it in his face - no man ever had a face that showed more plainly his character - in his vacuous grin, in his inevitable vulgarianhood, in his dyed hair and hair replacements. He will say anything that will please anyone. One or two fanciful statements have come close to dooming Hillary Clinton's formidable and disciplined campaign; but Berlusconi commits Hillary-isms every day of the week, and nobody seems to mind. We are used to it. Take the Alitalia situation. I posted about it (http://fpb.livejournal.com/290951.html), though I did not detail Berlusconi's part in it. Berlusconi is at least businessman enough to know that he would never invest in a company as wretched as Alitalia, and that, if he ever had to manage one, sackings and cutbacks would be the order of the day. However, in spite of being a businesman, he has been shamefully encouraging the craziest hopes of Alitalia and of the Milan airport Malpensa - which sees itself as an intercontinental "hub" airport, although there is not enough traffic in Italy for it. He has even said that he had arranged a goup of Italian investors to take over the company on better terms than Air France/KLM offered. His associates floated the names of a number of big businessmen. The very next day, every single one of these businessmen indignantly denied having been part of any such thing. Would this sort of crap not have sunk any candidacy, to so much as dog catcher, in any civilized country? And yet Berlusconi sails serenely on. Such trash is daily bread for him, and nobody ever presents the bill.
The truth is that Berlusconi has a servile soul. If you saw him on TV and were asked what kind of profession you would expect him to be in, the answer would be obvious: a waiter. And not a top-notch waiter in a really top-notch restaurant, but an ordinary waiter in a mediocre back street eatery. Even his climb to power has been, until 1992, a servile thing: he became the top TV magnate essentially in the service of another corrupt Milanese politician, Bettino Craxi - whose fantastic appropriations and arrogance eventually brought about the scandals that broke the First Republic. He was Craxi's friend, and oh so proud of the privilege. The little bully following the big bully. And when he eventually set up in politics on his own, it was mainly as Craxi's avenger, taking vengeance on all those who had destroyed his Big Friend - politicians, judges, journalists. He has never had a coherent policy in his life beyond cutting back the judiciary (which, admittedly, is an increasingly necessary job). And after fifteen years in politics, he is still the same snake-oil salesman. Snake-oil selling is suited for his servile soul - for a soul that wants to see people cheaply satisfied, cheaply pleased.
If this is the choice, you may ask, why on Earth vote for them? Because the other lot, as a whole, are worse, and have proved it. But I am tired and depressed and don't want to go on. Maybe in a day or two I will post on what passes for left-wing politics in Italy.
But even admitting that the others were bad, the Bossi-Fini-Berlusconi coalition is genuinely the bottom. Its leadership is so crass that it is genuinely difficult to explain to the rest of civilized mankind just how unimaginable it is that some of them had ever been allowed anywhere near power by an electorate that was free to choose.
Fini, the ex-Fascist, is the least intolerable of the three - and also the one who matters least. There is nothing to worry about in him: in his rush to shed all suspicions of Fascism or nationalism, he has morphed into the most predictable, shallow, and featureless middle-of-the-road PC politician, managing even a dumb little sex scandal that cost him a quite attractive wife. The trouble is that in seeking the consensual centre, he has taken several positions - in particular over embryo experimentation - that offend Catholics, and one of the lessons of the last two years is that you cannot govern Italy without Catholic support. What is more, his own party (now merged in Berlusconi's alliance) is made of people who, while they could see the sense of dumping Fascism as such, had a lot more respect for nationalism and old-fashioned values than he has. So he has lost support on two different grounds: the politically disastrous choice of challenging the Church, and the disaffection of a highly conservative and nationalistic base. What saves him is that there is nobody of any stature in the party to challenge him: the strongest figures are currently under investigation for very serious scandals - the kind of appropriation of public money that the old Fascist base were proud of not practicing in the days of the First Republic. So Fini stands because possible rivals are even less credible.
Bossi, the head of the Northern League, is not easy to explain to anyone who has no direct knowledge of the multiple train wreck that passes for Italian politics. Ignorant as a street thug, incapable of manners of any kind, he is the living embodyment of the worst kind of pub-philosopher, taxi-driver-hair-dresser political maunderer, of the kind of person whose attempts at an opinion you hear out in embarrassed silence. He relies on a base like himself, with no principles or religion (in a party that has to appeal to Catholics, he is an avowed pagan), who dropped out of school at fourteen to earn money and never learned anything else in their lives. Worst of all, he is a man who continuously uses the threat of violence without having the nerve to use it. To give an example of his incendiary rhetoric - one that did not reach the foreign press, because by now they discount him - was that if a certain kind of confusing electoral paper, which he supposed would work against him, was not changed, "we will take up our rifles". Governments of both sides have been subjected to this kind of repeated threat of violence for years. They, too, have learned to discount him. During the first Prodi government, ten years or so ago, he actually pretended to start a march for independence of the North from Rome. If this had been taken seriously, there was more than enough to suppress his party, chuck him in jail for high treason and assault upon the Constitution (both life-without-parole charges) and risk a civil war. Prodi, however, was coolly cynical. He let them have their fun. At the end of it, not a single state functionary had been turned out, the army, police and carabinieri were where they had always been, the Leghisti had had a lot of fun, nothing had changed, and nobody had been arrested. However, this constant talk of violence does have an effect - at the lowest level, where nobody notices. IN the last fifteen years, assaults upon Romans and southerners, and more recently upon immigrants, have become so frequent and vicious that the government has had to change the number-plates of cars to a system that does not show local origin. You cannot pour hatred into a country, build your power exclusively upon the most ignorant and vicious hatred, encourage your supporters in their ignorance and hatred, and not worsen conditions in the long run. Bossi is the scum of the Earth. I hate him particularly because, being myself half northern and half Roman/southern, he wants to take my country from me. But even if had no dog in this fight, I could still not begin to treat him as a decent human being without losing all my self-respect.
And Berlusconi... ahh, Berlusconi. How shall I explain our once and future Prime Minister to anyone who does not know that such thing can be? Firstly, by telling you that Berlusconi is nothing like what you would fear from a man in his position. He is not Citizen Kane. A foreigner thinking of a business tycoon, the richest man in the country, in control of most of the local television network and large financial and industrial holdings, and at the same time at the head of the country's largest party, would fear a direct assault on the freedom of thought and self-expression, the party use of television and other resources, the exclusion of other viewpoints. And Berlusconi has indeed sporadically made use of his resources. But the truth is that he is not coherent enough to develop a policy even within his own family business (his companies are tightly controlled, in the usual Italian fashion, by members of his own family). Being chiefly, indeed purely, a salesman, he shows whatever will sell. This has, in general, cheapened Italian TV - which, God knows, never was any great shakes - but the dreaded use of the jackboot to control popular culture has not come about. Apart from pathetically obvious and therefore easily resisted interventions in the news programs, there is not even the beginning of a coherent cultural policy in his enormous TV empire: unless showing as much female flesh as legally possible in prime-time shows amounts to a policy. There certainly is nothing conservative or Catholic, although these ought to be the support areas for his party.
Berlusconi, I said, is a salesman. To be precise (I have been a salesman myself), he is a snake-oil salesman. You can see it in his face - no man ever had a face that showed more plainly his character - in his vacuous grin, in his inevitable vulgarianhood, in his dyed hair and hair replacements. He will say anything that will please anyone. One or two fanciful statements have come close to dooming Hillary Clinton's formidable and disciplined campaign; but Berlusconi commits Hillary-isms every day of the week, and nobody seems to mind. We are used to it. Take the Alitalia situation. I posted about it (http://fpb.livejournal.com/290951.html), though I did not detail Berlusconi's part in it. Berlusconi is at least businessman enough to know that he would never invest in a company as wretched as Alitalia, and that, if he ever had to manage one, sackings and cutbacks would be the order of the day. However, in spite of being a businesman, he has been shamefully encouraging the craziest hopes of Alitalia and of the Milan airport Malpensa - which sees itself as an intercontinental "hub" airport, although there is not enough traffic in Italy for it. He has even said that he had arranged a goup of Italian investors to take over the company on better terms than Air France/KLM offered. His associates floated the names of a number of big businessmen. The very next day, every single one of these businessmen indignantly denied having been part of any such thing. Would this sort of crap not have sunk any candidacy, to so much as dog catcher, in any civilized country? And yet Berlusconi sails serenely on. Such trash is daily bread for him, and nobody ever presents the bill.
The truth is that Berlusconi has a servile soul. If you saw him on TV and were asked what kind of profession you would expect him to be in, the answer would be obvious: a waiter. And not a top-notch waiter in a really top-notch restaurant, but an ordinary waiter in a mediocre back street eatery. Even his climb to power has been, until 1992, a servile thing: he became the top TV magnate essentially in the service of another corrupt Milanese politician, Bettino Craxi - whose fantastic appropriations and arrogance eventually brought about the scandals that broke the First Republic. He was Craxi's friend, and oh so proud of the privilege. The little bully following the big bully. And when he eventually set up in politics on his own, it was mainly as Craxi's avenger, taking vengeance on all those who had destroyed his Big Friend - politicians, judges, journalists. He has never had a coherent policy in his life beyond cutting back the judiciary (which, admittedly, is an increasingly necessary job). And after fifteen years in politics, he is still the same snake-oil salesman. Snake-oil selling is suited for his servile soul - for a soul that wants to see people cheaply satisfied, cheaply pleased.
If this is the choice, you may ask, why on Earth vote for them? Because the other lot, as a whole, are worse, and have proved it. But I am tired and depressed and don't want to go on. Maybe in a day or two I will post on what passes for left-wing politics in Italy.